“... became Marilyn Monroe. Doris Kappelhoff became Doris Day, who then became Clara Bixby, a third self. You can look at the icon of Doris Day and at the woman known as Clara Bixby, but not at the same time. There are some sunny elements to her childhood: a beloved older brother, an extended family in a tight-knit German-American neighbourhood, an Uncle ...”

“... your speeches, Dick Nixon?’ jeered Charlene, a tall, leggy, mussed-blonde deserter groupie and self-described Missouri trailer trash. Charlene, fed up with ‘American fascist bullshit’, had landed on us one day along with a tubercular deserter from Stockholm’s snowdrifts, Stanislau (‘Stash’), the son of Polish immigrants who ran a bakery in ...”

“... place after a relatively short interval. Earlier studies had ‘focused only on adults who had self-identified as gay/lesbian/bisexual back in the 1970s and 1980s’, whereas she wanted to find out about women who were coming out now, women who had ‘grown up with much greater exposure to ideas about same-sex sexuality than had previous ...”

“... of the plays and are illustrated with Gray’s own artwork, usually topped and tailed by (self-) critical essays and full of polemic. Chunks of a political pamphlet will turn up a few years later, unaltered, in a book of short stories. What I believed, on my first reading, to be a brilliant piece of fiction – ‘A Report to the Trustees of the ...”

“... just before or just after the Second World War. Everything suggests that light regulation or self-regulation of financial institutions never works. In the General Theory, Keynes said he expected the state increasingly to determine the patterns of investment because the state, unlike everyone else, can take the long view. Keynes went further than we would ...”

“... Isbell instead of bailing out, and he crashes. Isbell bails out, and soon recovers. Cassada’s self-sacrifice goes unnoticed: competence is what counts. Now that Isbell is viewed from the outside he is both more flawed – he sounds more mistakenly sure of himself – and more likeable than in The Arm of Flesh: ‘Isbell’s task was biblical. It was the ...”

“... to its meaning. Merton (who was himself a gifted minter of new words and phrases, including ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and ‘focus group’), and Elinor Barber, a historian, set out to chart the picaresque career of ‘serendipity’ in the 1950s, when the word had crossed over from the realm of literary arcana to that of scientific buzzwords, but had ...”

“... it in their guts. Such a turning can be made only by a comprehensive constitutional effort – a self-reform in which, incidentally, the UK crown and royal family now has a minor role. It has to extend from reform of the parliamentary system to a reconciliation with the Aboriginal population. That was the point of Germaine Greer’s recent admirable polemic ...”

“... the Nazi commitment would not slacken, that the search for a solution one way or another to this self-imposed problem would not fade away into obscurity or be indefinitely postponed. No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as Hitler did himself. Note the ‘...”

“... of exposition to make it available to a broad public. This is history meant to matter to the self-comprehension and self-definition of a people, but its central argument is questionable to an even greater extent than its author’s dexterity in anticipating criticism allows. The title is, of course, a sidelong ...”

“... is mild domestic psychosis and there are soft furnishings. All art is the art of real estate and self-help. The universe described is a middle-class America, a place of spiritual lassitude and window-blinds. Market populism travels in through the air-conditioning and fastens to the red blood cells. And in these lives, and in the books and films that venture ...”

“... it.’ Again, the interest of the book is in these field reports, but it also lies in Seabrook’s self-analysis, as he graphs this ‘tectonic shift’ in culture on the fly. What are the bearings that Seabrook takes? Even though he is a self-declared ‘hegemonoculous’ (a wonderful-horrible appellation meant as a homage ...”

“... and gulfs, was to the author of Oceans never clear or never considered. Forewords are so often self-serving that I tend to skip them, hoping to hold on to some regard for the writer at least until after the first pallid pages of his book have slipped away into the ‘nevermore to be remembered’. Their premature celebrations of genius are usually a ...”

“... American reputation. For the first third of this slim book, his tone alternates between fond self-mockery of his youthful passion for Allende and a bristling defence of ‘that momentous point’ in the history of Chile and indeed the world: ‘For many millions around the world, Chile briefly shined as a beacon of inspiration. It gave life to the notion ...”

“... is ignoble because he does not stand up for himself and his own. The assertiveness required of a self-respecting man was frowned on in slaves and women. Medea’s vengefulness was all the more terrible for being the expression of womanly rage. (A goddess’s anger is beyond condemnation, like a storm at sea.) To call the non-angry man ‘slavish’ is itself ...”